Mysteries.

Something Scary Runs In The Family

July 03, 1994|By Dick Adler. Special to the Tribune.

Who says summer reading means checking your brain in your beach locker? Certainly not the authors of the best of this month's crop of mysteries.

In fact, Jupiter's Daughter by Tom Hyman (Viking, $21.95) is more scientific thriller than straight mystery, a stunning and very frightening story of DNA research run amok that should make a better movie than "Jurassic Park." For one thing, people are being tinkered with here, not giant lizards. For another, the central character is a totally believable woman named Anne Stewart who fights to protect her child. And what a child: Genny Stewart at just under 4 years old has more surprises than Stephen King's Carrie without making you forget for a moment that she's still a toddler.

Hyman has done fine work before, most recently in "Prussian Blue," but he surpasses himself in his latest book by combining solid action scenes with quieter moments of scientific enlightenment. So as Anne begins to discover what her biotech Donald Trump of a husband has really done to her and their child, the explanation rings true because we understand what's happening-just as our horror at the other DNA experiments conducted by Stewart's rivals is heightened by knowing why they're going wrong.

I predicted that her last Sharon McCone book would make Marcia Muller a best-selling icon of the Grafton/Paretsky ilk. Well, maybe the book that will finally do the job is Till The Butchers Cut Him Down (Mysterious Press, $18.95), in which McCone decides to strike out on her own, moving away from the sheltering but also smothering bosom of the All Souls legal cooperative in San Francisco where she has been working as an investigator.

Muller builds her multileveled story around the sudden return into McCone's life of a fascinating character called Suitcase Gordon, who in her Berkeley days peddled everything from drugs to term papers out of a battered suitcase. Now he's a specialist in turning around failing corporations, making money and enemies with ease. Keeping Suits alive takes McCone on a grisly tour of some of the nation's darkest industrial moments-the ghost of a mining town in Nevada, the wreck of a steel town in Pennsylvania, the polluted mess of the Hunters Point seaport near Candlestick Park.

". . .Borne on the cold air was a sense of waste and ruin," Muller writes. "A sense of forgotten lives spent in largely forgotten toil. A confirmation of the futility of most forms of human endeavor." Reading those lines make me think that Marcia Muller has the best chance to be the Ross Macdonald of the '90s.

Stephen Dobyns might be getting a little tired of his Charlie Bradshaw character. In Saratoga Backtalk (Norton, $19.95), his eighth book in the series set in the famous New York racing town, poet/professor Dobyns turns the narration over to Victor Plotz, described by a local newspaper columnist as "a big overweight fellow in his mid-sixties with frizzy gray hair that stuck out in all directions and a nose turned vermillion from excessive drink." (Does that say "Falstaff" to you, or what?)

A former men's clothing salesman who drifted into crime before Bradshaw saved him, Plotz has some enviable qualities and some interesting sexual preferences. But the plot of "Saratoga Backtalk"-a series of murders where something one person does or says or thinks sets off another person in a totally unpredictable way-cries out for more of the cool, cerebral Charlie.

A title from a Mozart/Daponte opera, bawdy quotes from Shakespeare, passing references to art, music, philosophy and history. We must be in Nicolas Freeling country, where cops and criminals drip with erudition and the language is peppered with all the flavors of Europe. You Who Know (Mysterious Press, $18.95) sends Henri Castang-no longer a French cop, now a European Community bureaucrat based in Brussels (or "Bruce," as everybody calls it here)-and his remarkable Czech wife, Vera, on a private investigation of the Mafia-style killing of an Irish friend.

Along the way, Castang exposes himself to a sniper (I winced; Freeling has already killed off one detective series star-Van der Valk-in this manner), and Vera steals the scene from an art-collecting villain. Who could ask for anything more?

Where Dead Soldiers Walk by Lloyd Biggle Jr. (St. Martin's, $20.95) could make you change your summer travel plans to include a visit to the Civil War battlefields around Chattanooga and rural Georgia. That's where Biggle's resourceful detective J. Pletcher (he makes up various first names to suit his mood) does his digging as he tries to unravel a case involving the missing and/or recently deceased heirs of an eccentric old millionaire who likes to put on a Confederate general's uniform and restage battles, complete with live cannonballs. The low-key Pletcher and his glamorous partner, Raina Lambert, are still good company in this, their third outing, and Biggle has adeptly surrounded them with a rich, sharply observed crew of supporting characters.